Question

I’m trying to use FlashMessenger to notify another user of an event. Does anyone know if this is possible?

Something like

$flashMessenger->addMessage( array('status'=> '', 'message'=> 'Hello!'), $user);

Answer 1

Quoting the manual page of the FlashMessenger :

The FlashMessenger helper allows you
to pass messages that the user may
need to see on the next request. To
accomplish this, FlashMessenger uses
Zend_Session_Namespace to store
messages for future or next request
retrieval.

So, the messages are stored in session — and a session is attached to / corresponds to a user ; the current user, actually.

The session is not meant to store data that is shared between different users — so I would say that this component cannot be used to notify other users of an event ; not natively, at least.

A possible solution would be :

• when you detect there is a message that must go to other users, store it in database (some table with a foreign key pointing to the destination user, if the destination user is a connected-user ; some table storing the message, if it can be seen by anyone).
• on each page, you check in that DB table if the is a message that has to be displayed
• if yes, you put it in the FlashMessenger, which will display it on next page load from the current user.

A bit tricky, and not as easy as you’d hope, I admit…

Another idea, instead of using a database, would be to use some Caching engine (like APC, memcached, … see Zend_Cache, to avoid hitting the DB.

Have fun !